1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a magnetic data processing device, method, and program, and a magnetic processing system, and more particularly, to a technology for deducing an attitude and an orientation without use of an acceleration sensor.
2. Background Art
In recent years, mounting a magnetic sensor and an acceleration sensor in a mobile entity such as a personal digital assistant (PDA), a portable cellular phone, or a vehicle has prevailed. The magnetic sensor includes magnetic sensor modules for decomposing a vector of a magnetic field into mutually orthogonal components and detecting the decomposed components. Magnetic data that is an output of the magnetic sensor is a combination of the outputs of the respective magnetic sensor modules, and is vector data represented by a linear combination of mutually orthogonal fundamental vectors. The direction and magnitude of the magnetic data correspond to the direction and magnitude of the magnetic field detected by the magnetic sensor.
The acceleration sensor detects a gravitational acceleration in a static state, and can therefore detect the inclination of a mobile entity with a vertical direction as a reference. Once the direction of geomagnetism is identified with a mobile entity as a reference and the inclination of the mobile entity is identified with the vertical direction as a reference, the attitude of the mobile entity can be deduced with an azimuth as a reference. For example, Reference is made to International Patent Publication No. WO/2006-009247 Pamphlet.
However, in order to deduce the attitude of a mobile entity with an azimuth as a reference, both a magnetic sensor and an acceleration sensor are conventionally needed.